Marvelously entertaining and frequently harrowing, Glory in a Camel's Eye recounts the American travel writer Jeffrey Tayler's dangerous three-month journey across the Moroccan Sahara in the company of Arab nomads. Glory in a Camel's Eye gives us an intimate, often surprising portrait of Saharan Africa: the cultural conflicts between native Berbers and Arabs, the clashes between devout desert-dwelling nomads and their city-dwelling counterparts. Fluent in Arabic, Tayler assembles an image of modern life very much at odds with our Western assumptions. He observes and reports "with eloquence and an eye for the improbable" (Outside).
PRODUCT DETAILS
Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: 15th February 2005 Catalog: Book Media: Paperback Number Of Pages: 258 Ean: 9780618492220 Isbn: 0618492224 Upc: 046442492225
ABOUT THIS BOOK
USER REVIEWS
The dangers of falling in love with explorers' tales ~ Written on Jul 27, 2009. out of 1 users found this review helpful.
Instead of being subtitled "A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert", this book should have been subtitled "The Dangers of Trying to Recreate Your Favorite Explorer Tales".
Isn't there a line in "Lawrence of Arabia" about Lawrence being one of those "desert loving English". What we have here is the tale of a Arabic-speaking modern American who has fallen in love with the desert and the explorer tales of traveling with Bedouins across Arab's Empty Quarter, so naturally as a writer, he wants to recreate this hero's journey so he can write about it. And while he does make it all the way across the Moroccan Sahara to the Atlantic Ocean, even across Western Sahara where there's a war on and it's heavily mined and they really don't want tourists, he spares us none of the messy discomfort and all of the wonder. His paragraph on buying green, fly-specked meat in a market is longer than the section on the 10 different local words for desert.
great! ~ Written on May 11, 2006. 12 out of 13 users found this review helpful.
tayler is a keen observer of humankind, erudite, articulate, fair-minded. i stumbled on this book and now look forward to reading everything he's written.
(2 customer reviews)
The dangers of falling in love with explorers' tales
great!
